Our final week of the AudiobookSYNC 2017 season features a pair of powerful novels about do-over lives, performed in artful celebrations of the audiobook medium. We hope you find them an excellent last call for SYNC 2017 and that you want to come back to them again as well as to SYNC in 2018.

AudiobookSYNC’s penultimate week of the 2017 season takes a journey back to World War II’s Eastern Front. A well-researched teen novel and a memoir reveal lesser known stories of young women involved in the war.

AudiobookSYNC participants with a yen for fantasy with historical twists are in for a treat with this week’s free audiobook downloads. This pair offers some steampunk, some alternative history, and a pair of protagonists who are clever and brave.

This week, AudiobookSYNC offers a pair of dark fantasies in which young people are pitted against the odds of survival. The sceneries may be fantastic, and yet there are real-world matters at their cores.

In our eleventh week of AudiobookSYNC’s eighth season, our pair of audiobooks presents friendships that require work to create and to maintain. Both titles are realistic contemporary fiction, one performed as an audio drama and the other as a novel told from multiple characters’ viewpoints. After all, that’s how friendship is: more than a single voice with a single perspective.

Each summer, the AudiobookSYNC program offers a library of downloadable audiobooks for teens to keep. The selections change each week and free downloading is limited to the week each title is featured. The free audiobooks are presented in pairs, sharing a theme.

Our AudiobookSYNC offerings for Week 9 include the audiobook debut of the earliest published stories from a teen who later became a prolific fantasy author, and a second that delves into the true history of the teens and women on whom Colonial America’s witch hysteria focused.

During Week 8 of AudiobookSYNC, our pair of free audiobooks features American cultural history that may be new to many listeners. Both come from insiders, rather than providing viewpoints from outside the cultures they portray.

In recognition of high school’s traditional evening of high fashion and romance, the sixth week of AudiobookSYNC 2017 offers a pair of free audiobooks that will satisfy prom-goers, prom-avoiders, romantics, and cynics alike. Both take inspiration from the folktale of Beauty and the Beast; however, each is unique and more nuanced than any Disney version.

The pair of audiobooks offered by AudiobookSYNC this fifth week features characters who have been required to conform to identities chosen for them. Many teens have felt this put-upon sense that conflicts with self-identity, although usually they are caught in less extreme circumstances than the young adults we meet here. Listening to these audios, then, can awaken both empathy for others and insight about.the difference between relying on social pressures to conform and recognizing one's own identity as essentially one's own responsibility.

It’s Week 4 of AudiobookSYNC’s free audiobook program! This week, the pair of audiobooks you can download for free and to keep invites listeners to consider what might be happening around them. Stepping away from attending to our own self-interest to notice how others are affected by circumstances and events is a big step toward developing empathy.

We come to our third week of AudiobookSYNC 2017 with two audiobooks celebrating teens who speak from the heart. Poetry and diaries both cut to the essence of what we need to say, and the voices teens can hear this week may inspire the articulation of their own feelings, thoughts, and concerns. Both of these audiobooks are short, offering good listening introductions for those new to the audio format.

Week 2 of AudiobookSYNC 2017 features a pair of audiobooks that take us into possibilities for the future of humanity. Both have been popular in audio since they first became available, and every new listener can quickly understand why.

We kick off with a pair of audiobooks each of which provides a great blend of horror, quirks in time’s effects on main characters, and the invitation to ask who each of us believes ourselves to be. What do we know about ourselves, really, or how accurately others judge our actions?

With just two weeks left until showtime, we're seeing many of you posting messages on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram that share your excitement, anticipation, and, in some cases, newfound discovery, of SYNC. Thank you and keep getting the word out there!